Post navigation

Ration Book Recipe: Baked Sweet Potato and Honey

The first recipe I decided to try from the Ration Book Diet (see my review here) was, of course, the Sweet Potato and Honey winter dish. The original recipe would have had regular potatoes rather than the sweet variety, so I’m definitely glad the writers decided to change it (because sweet potatoes are uh-mazing).

When getting the ingredients together, I was quite alarmed at the amount of sugar involved (honey, demerara sugar, blueberries, sultanas, and then the option to sweeten with more honey if required!) All in all this amounts to 21g per person – but then, as the book explains, the British diet at this time contained a lot of sugar (more than just about every other country in Europe).

Anyway, the ingredients were pretty easy to source – sweet potatoes, cinnamon, blueberries, walnuts, demerara sugar… the only thing I didn’t manage was the acacia honey, which I just substituted with the honey we already had in the cupboard.

The recipe jumps straight in, telling you to “Mix the cooked and mashed sweet potato with the ground cinnamon and acacia honey”. We decided to cook the potato by boiling it, as we would for normal mash (although we didn’t add any milk to the mash as it wasn’t in the list of ingredients). We added the cinnamon, honey, blueberries and walnuts in the pan, then transferred the mixture to a glass dish to bake in the oven.

That’s pretty much all you need to do! It’s so easy. The book suggests serving the potato with fromage frais – we went for Greek yoghurt and it worked really well. It definitely didn’t need sweetening with any more honey, although the combination of sweet and savoury ingredients (especially the walnuts) meant that it didn’t taste too sickly sweet – instead it was just as the book described, “rich and warming”.

If you want to try this recipe, you can find it in the Ration Book Diet, which you can buy here.

Post navigation

Search

Search

Who Am I?

London-based Ancient and Modern History graduate from Oxford University, with a particular passion for the history of gender and emotion. Can often be found drinking tea, watching films, or crying over love letters from the Great War.

Follow This Blog

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.